Holy Red Herrings, Batman! It's almost as if I wrote "If you have HVDC, and and solar power generation in a single geographic region suddenly become stable", rather than what I actually wrote:

Probably the best thing you can do is simply have a powerful HVDC grid so you can move power between different geographic regions and to use different types of renewables techs

Even in Germany, solar plus wind alone is much less random than purely solar or purely wind. But combined over a broad geographic region, the figures are surprisingly stable. HVDC lines also (their main purpose today) link you up with other regions so that you can use them as peaking when you need it and they don't (esp. regions with hydro, since hydro is much more total-energy-limited than power-limited, and nameplate power capacity can be uprated if necessary with little ecological impact and proportionally very small cost).

then your "high voltage DC net" myth will collapse.

Which is why Germany and Denmark are in a constant state of blackout?

Honest policy by a - say - PHD-in-physics politico would be to demand storage for at least 5 days for every Watt of "renewable" power installed.

That argument of yours makes no sense, since it doesn't account for capacity factor or generation profiles.

It would mean lifting up the entire lake constance by dozens of meters.

This claim is unevaluatable without knowing how much backup energy you're meaning to provide.

But if you are just a fucking liar with a physics PHD, you skip the storage.

Storage and peaking generation are 100% interchangeable. You can use any combination of either. And as stated, the need for either storage or peaking generation depends on the randomness of the supply, and 1) the more types of sources you use, and 2) the broader the geographic area you collect from, the less net randomness in the generation.

It should be noted that the power grid today is already highly random - not in terms of supply fluctuations, but demand fluctuations. Nighttime demand averages about a third of daytime generation, and there are sudden spikes and dropoffs at certain times of day. The current approach to the grid - peaking - deals with high levels of randomness just fine.

(it should also be noted that HVDC across time zones also helps you level out time-of-day demand spikes)

Not necessarily, it depends on your usage profile. If you're talking about power suddenly dropping out for half an hour then coming back, you're absolutely right. But if you're talking about it suddenly dropping out when a certain weather pattern moves in and staying out until it moves on, then of course it'd be useful.

Make a basic income available to everyone (funded by the Fed, not the taxpayer, at zero cost).

The point is that it's not zero cost. Every penny of money "funded by the Fed" comes from your and my pockets - sometimes with a big multiplier - by paths that are not as obvious, but just as costly, as a tax bill.

The biggest one is inflation: If the Fed just prints money, it dilutes the rest of the money. Your wages go down (though the numbers don't change.) Got retirement savings? They go down, too. Your investments go down - but the numbers make it look like they wen't up, and the government taxes the fake "gain". Everything you buy gets more expensive.

Most big data is videos, photo and audio which are played sequentially or in big enough chunks like one photo at the time that random access times and IOPS don't matter, a defragged hard drive is simply perfect for the task.

Err, no. Depends on what kind of video you're doing. In the video world it's easy to end up bottlenecked by disk I/O.

HD resolution ProRes files for instance will tax any hard drive, requiring over 40MB/s (330mbs) throughput:
https://documentation.apple.co...

I'm working with 4K sources, of which some are uncompressed. You need RAID or SSD.

I got distracted by the crazy link bait crap at the bottom of the page. Come on slashdot... I've been a member for nearly 15 years but you're about to lose me. I don't mind a banner ad here or there but I see one more "10 foods that'll make you old" I'm going to scream.

Oh yeah, so the intersection of a crazy and computer science brought this to life... oh great.

It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.

In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.

I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
  * It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
  * It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.

The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. [Insurance usually has escape clauses for riots.]

Just heard on the news that more than half of the stores destroyed last night in Fergusun were minority owned, too. (I think it was actually "black owned" but I'm not sure.)

IMHO the main point of the burning is so that, once the stores have been looted, the evidence of who did it is largely destroyed. Video survelience tapes, fingerprints, serial number records, ...

And IIIIII will love you again! I will love you! Like I uuuuuuussssed tooooooo!

Again, if a person is willing to pay the costs, they should be allowed to. Secondly, there's a difference between the car having to drive 10 minutes to a parking garage and circling endlessly for hours. Third, when you're talking fully automated roadways, you get greatly increased throughput. Fourth, your "there's only so much road space in downtown areas" claim makes no sense, we're talking about how automated vehicles can free up space downtown by preventing the need for "convenient parking", allowing parking to be clustered into dense and/or less convenient locations, depending on the situation.

Moving parts != motor oil. Electric motors most commonly have a small amount of grease that's designed to never need replacement. There's also some that use hydraulic or air bearings.

Motor oil that's designed to wear out with time is part of the consequences of having to work in the harsh environment of internal combustion engines. It's not a fundamental requirement of moving parts.

People would spend their time engaged in their preferred hobbies. Tinkerers would tinker. Musicians would make music. Writers would write. Programmers would program. Gardeners would garden. And on and on. I see nothing wrong with such a world.

Now, whether people's needs (let alone wants) could be met when you're having such a big global GDP cut, I think THAT's a more serious concern...